Re: [Marketing] Microsoft Office 12 Preview 1

[Graham Lauder]

Anthony Hess wrote:
On 3/10/05 5:17 AM, "Lars D. Nood�n" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't think Ive seen that - I think people are fairly critical of
Microsoft in the tech press.  Their software is certainly a lot better than
it was in the 90s - even if most of the features aren't ones that will be
used by people or aren't particularly innovative.  

Office 97 better than  '95, yes.  Individual elements of Office XP were 
improvements over '97
However the improvement curve flattened out way back.  I have MS Office 
4.3 running on  a Win95 box (Nostalgia  ;) ) and it is very usable and 
lacks little in terms of day to day usability.  After Office 95 there 
was not a huge improvement which is why MS forced the upgrade by making 
Off97 files unreadable by Off95.  After that many small businesses were 
panicked into the next upgrade.  There were huge numbers of people that 
were convinced that 97 would not read Off2K and OffXP files.  Those 
people were locked into the "upgrade by fear" treadmill and didn't even 
know it

I don't think anyone can
deny that Windows XP is a far better OS in a number of ways than Windows 98
was, 

Better than 98 yes, but not better in any significant way, and worse in 
many significant ways, than Win 2000 and/or NT4. 
XP was about "Eyecandy" not functionality and an experiment in MS 
longterm goal in controlling each computer user from Redmond via the 
infamous registration hoop jumping and the Orwellian EULA

same goes for Exchange 2003 versus say 5, or Office (it might be a
million little changes, but set them side by side sometime and dig in), or
just about anything else they make.  Too bad for Microsoft they have to
charge so much for their product in order to get the required profits - for
the 90 percent of the people that don't need MSO feature X OO is just as
good or better (as you mentioned, open file formats - probably the most
important thing about OO in terms of selling to CIOs), and it costs a whole
lot less.
Tony
 

Oh if we had the marketing dollars.  Time for the OOo Foundation to be 
born I think

Cheers
Yo
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